


The Bald Man

by Hiccupthemagicalteapot



Category: Original Work
Genre: Late Night Writing, Writing Exercise, descriptive writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 22:17:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15828030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hiccupthemagicalteapot/pseuds/Hiccupthemagicalteapot
Summary: A bald man finds himself in the desert and the desert claims his body.





	The Bald Man

The Bald Man  
The bald man was happy. He was happy despite being bald. He was happy even when sweat trickled from his head into his eyes and mouth. He was happy when the sun warmed his bald head. He was happy when the winter winds played on his scalp. He was happy when the stars raced across the world to see themselves in his head. The bald man was so bald that when the stars peaked down at him from the heavens above; they would think his head was a curved mirror that bent the light of the world and made it infinitely more beautiful.  
Every day the bald man would go to work. He worked from the early hours of the morning till the magical minutes of sunset. He worked past sunrise and sunset and greeted the sun and moon as they orbited above his hairless brain box. The man worked hard and well. He was happy as fatigue invited itself into his body but never past the foyer to his heart.   
The bald man woke up one day in a desert far away from home. He was still happy even as the sun boiled his skin brown. He began from nothing, this bald man. He built a house that kissed the helms of the clouds from sand and stone. He found a wife that filled his heart with love and made the happy bald man even happier. The world envied his happiness. The sun envied him as it bled its light to the world. The moon envied him as it was pushed under the tyrant sun. The desert earth envied the fertile grounds of his head even though it was bare.  
The years passed the bald man. His happiness was slowly tainted and corrupted by the green bare desert and its burnt people. The bald man kept receiving presents from the people around him. Everyone gave him what he did not have, hair. Day after day, people plucked hairs off their heads and stabbed them into the bald man’s scalp. They speared hairs into his head. Follicles were dropped out of the pregnant clouds like rain. The sun warmed them and they grew like mighty trees. Soon the sun did not reach the shadowy enclaves of his skin under the forest of hair. The winter winds stopped chasing one another and playing on the once vast expanse of open land; all winds battered his hair like the winds on a sail. The stars never peaked at him again. The bald man stopped being bald.  
The bald man became the hairy man. He had a thick mane of long hair. His hair was a myriad of colors; it was brown and black and red and gold. It was silver and grey and young and old. Every morning he tripped on his hair. Every night he wrapped it around him in a blanket. The hairy man never saw his face again in the mirror.  
He tried and tried and pulled and pulled and ripped and ripped. Come sunrise his hair would have doubled. They had the light of a moonless night, the softness of battered steel anvils and the shortness of the Norse world snake. His pillow became red and his wife’s hair was stained crimson. She left him and as the doors closed behind her the light in the hairy man’s eyes disappeared, perhaps stolen by the sun as payment, and a thousand thousand hairs sprouted on the hairy man’s face.   
The hairy man drilled a hole into the wall under the topmost window of his house. He then grabbed the end of his hair and passed it into the opening and over the windowsill. He tied his hair in a knot. The hairy man walked back to the end of the room. The hairy man ran. He jumped. He fell.  
The scent of nightshade and the songs of an owl were his companions as he plummeted to the earth. The stars recognized him and sent angels carrying bows. The angels knocked their bows with arrows that held strands of unbreakable starlight and shot them underneath him. They wove a web in the flash of an instant but they were and an instant too late. The hairy man fell so quickly that he tore the web of starlight. His tied hair whipped an angel in half dying a miniscule fraction of it in golden ichor.  
The hair rope went taut and the hair man’s head was ripped of his neck. Shrouded in gossamer starsilk, his body descended alone like a feather dancing on the wind. The head hung like a spider’s cocooned prey. His hair did not allow a single drop of blood to water the earth.


End file.
